The cash supply chain is manual, complex, has inherent risk issues, and is dispersed throughout a network of self-service cash handling devices such as automatic teller machines (ATMs), as well as cash vaults and banking centers. The costs of depositing, distributing, and managing cash across a major bank, as well as the amount of daily excess cash carried by such a bank, can be substantial.
Today's client deposit process does not adequately allow clients and internal cash supply chain processing units to view the status of client deposits as the deposits move from deposit site through asset verification and credit. Deposit bags are handled multiple times in the current process (and possibly by many different parties), which increases potential errors and complicates finding missing deposits or understanding where errors occurred and assigning fiduciary responsibility for those errors. Pertinent pieces of deposit data are typically manually entered and reentered into front-end systems throughout the end-to-end process. The collaboration and sharing of information across multiple organizations and with multiple vendors may make this process very complex and increases risk to the bank and bank clients.
In addition, self-service cash handling devices have improved the clearing speed of checks, enabled cost reductions and delighted customers with deposit photo receipts and immediate funds available for check and cash deposits. However, servicing and processing of self-service cash handling device deposits is an extremely manual process, is labor intensive and time consuming, and provides multiple opportunities for errors that directly impact bank customers and banking center associates. Currently, self-service cash handling device technology and operations do not have electronic tracking and monitoring of cash and check bags from self-service cash handling device deposit pull servicing through asset verification and check storage. Handling of contents from cash and check bags involve manual chain of custody, cash verification and reconciliation processing. Valuable pieces of information are re-keyed into general ledger, cash vault asset management tracking and image check filing and retrieval systems. Data that is relied upon is in paper receipt format, hand written on bags or is non-existent for cash verification and reconciliation.